Wright's comment on his own novel is an appropriate epigram for this paper, which investigates the phenomenon of psychological realism in the style I loosely term literary impressionism in the construction of scenes of warfare in Crane's and Cather's famous war novels, The Red Badge of Courage and One of Ours. Neither Crane nor Cather ever personally experienced the battlefield (importantly, Cather was criticized for having written a war novel without having experienced battle whereas Crane was applauded for having done the same) but nonetheless both managed to capture the language which might be said to convey the visceral experience of warfare. How did they do so? Both authors direct the actions of their protagonists through atmospheric and often abstract description—what R. W. Stallman has called “prose pointillism.”1 To extend the synesthesia, one might call Cather and Crane contrapuntal (or counterpoint) in their style—a musical term which suggests...

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